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tlOW SHOULD 

HISTORY 

BE TAUGHT? 



I 



BY 

M^^V €f 33rpant Cmerp 



1903 

LYNN, MASS. 
U. S. A. 



2DetJicateti 

'To My Father George Edwin Emery 
Poet, Journalist and Historical Writer 



A NEJF 
TEACHING OF HISTORY 

THERE has been a great, an im- 
mense change in the writing of his- 
tory, mainly in the last thirty years, 
brought about by the researches of scholars 
and the bringing to light by the publication, 
as well as by the perusal of the documents, 
the records and the long-buried letters of the 
whole world. All this has revolutionized 
history, and must change the thought of 
millions. 

No government which possesses manu- 
scripts but has at length yielded them to the 
patient labor of the men and women who 

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guard the future, the writer who makes plain 
what the world has been, that we may not 
stumble in the world which is to be. Every 
ducal palace, every governmental bureau, 
every country manor, every peasant home is 
being literally ransacked for tidings of the 
past, and all this is poured into print with 
as great fervor and relentless speed as if 
another and greater French Revolution 
were upon us and all the originals were to 
be destroyed. 

It is inevitable that, with a fuller knowl- 
edge, many of the conclusions drawn by elder 
writers should undergo marked change, per- 
haps not so much in the mitigation of villainy, 
or the adulation of virtue, as in the clearer 
sight of causes and effects, — what may be 
termed the physics of history. Both in 
character and volume history has changed. 
How much only its custodians know. 

For the first, one may turn to the True 
George Washington and Real Benjamin 
Franklin — works in every one's mouth ; 

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that is, in every one's beyond the coal- 
breaker boy, and they would not be beyond 
him but for a new slavery that has arisen 
upon the earth. A new sin which has had 
its counterpart, but never its like upon the 
earth before. 

In its volume and exact recording of causes 
and effects, the change has been astounding 
and incalculable. For the last, one may speak 
of the oft-quoted and solemnly inculcated 
statement that William Penn's treaty with 
the Indians was the only one never broken, 
because of the strict justice and tolerant kind- 
ness of the early Quaker proprietors toward 
the savages. The cause of all this, as John 
Fiske, one of our greatest modern historians, 
has conclusively shown, was the cruel con- 
quering of the tribes of the seaboard by their 
fierce enemies of kindred blood, the Five 
Nations, who at the time of Penn's settle- 
ment had more than half exterminated them, 
and had bound the survivors in the bonds of 
a cruel slavery which left them subject to 

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any newcomers. They were bound by oath 
which if broken meant annihilation by their 
foes, to bear no arms and to pursue only the 
occupations of squaws or Indian women. It 
is small wonder and small glory compared 
with that which he has been receiving with so 
much complacency foriwo hundred and fifty 
years that the founders of our wealthy com- 
monwealth will get from revised history. 

But in volume, in torrent, in mass, in ex- 
tent, and in breadth and painstaking detail, 
in a distribution of fertile fact, which, like an 
inundation of the Nile, has covered the earth, 
no subject of modern thought and study, ex- 
cept science, equals it. 

The production of literature varies com- 
paratively little from age to age ; in all 
countries allowing thought and record its 
blossoming is sure. Its value differs amaz- 
ingly ; so much that, dazzled by the radiance 
of the spacious days of the great Elizabeth 
and our late Victorian era, we forget that, 
though less highly valued, the dismal inter- 

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regnums had almost as many poets and 
prosifiers. 

Do not misunderstand when I say that 
never has there been so great a forest of his- 
tory. Records, made as records should be, in 
bare, simple and concise form, easily tabu- 
lated, — these, invaluable as they are and will 
continue to be, — are not history. They are 
only the materials of history. Literature 
may have fact or imagination for its founda- 
tion ; it blossoms to truth and beauty from 
either stem. Would that it were always the 
good as well as the true and the beautiful ! 

History is the orderly and systematic pre- 
sentation of the sequence of facts with a view 
to their important bearing upon future 
thought and conduct. Literature has, or 
should have, ethical fitness — the sanction of 
true religion ; but beyond that its tangled 
blossoms may riot as fancy's pleasure is. Can 
history be derived from literature ? Some- 
times. It is a difficult matter; for, first, the 
literature as literature is destroyed, and the 

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resultant facts to be used as material collected 
as from dust — dry records for its use. 

So great is the difference between literature 
and history ! It is, I again repeat, not a mere 
matter of style, but of content, and that of 
history is of strict, definite purpose. Liter- 
ature, like religion, persuades ; history, Hke 
law, teaches. 

Dealing sometimes with the same subjects, 
often with the same epochs, the distinction 
between them is not clearly seen. When it 
is, there will come the time for a difference 
in their teaching. 

To me, who for years have been kept to 
another work, watching the special work of 
my desire in instruction done as best they 
could by others, has come a time when the 
desire to instruct those who must do what I 
no longer shall have power to do, to be what 
is the ideal of any worker in any field, a leader 
of a new and a better way to accomplish an 
important and honorable purpose, to teach 
history as it should be taught, with the modern 
mass of history before us. 

lO 



However great the amount of literature in 
any language is or may be, the point of se- 
lection once passed, any portion may be taken 
by itself alone. One or twenty poems, plays 
or volumes, all precious, — it is a matter then 
only of hours, of tastes, of ability to choose 
for mental profit and for the soul's solace. 
We have many a teacher of literature, from 
the mother who sings the old ballad to her 
listening children and the primary teacher 
with her flock of children who with folded 
hands repeat their memory gems to the great 
ones of earth, poets themselves, who have 
taught themselves as they taught others song. 

Just as it always has been taught, so liter- 
ature must ever be taught, from the old be- 
ginnings onward. From the narrow rivulets 
and trickling streams and shining cascades of 
rippling song to the broad sea of Shake- 
speare's almost boundless mind and art. 

History, as I have already said, is, in its 
plan, its purpose, its scope, different ; more- 
over by the immense mass of new material 

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furnished by modern research, It has assumed 
a new character, taken on new aspects and 
shows new and unexpected features even in 
familiar places. 

How shall the modern teacher deal with 
it ? Every author has his own methods, but 
the well-equipped instructor of so important 
a branch as this has no one writer for his sole 
guide, else human liberty of thought were 
lost and human progress impeded. 

To make a good beginning is imperative. 
To start with myth is to establish a false 
base — to present literature and not history, — 
and history is not a mere side growth from 
the literary stem ; it is the indispensably 
secular and constructive. Comparing them 
both to pyramids, literature never quite comes 
down to the ground ; it would not be litera- 
ture if it did, but its mouth is towards us 
like a huge trumpet, its apex in the clouds, 
and through it may come the immediate voice 
of God to man. To study literature we be- 
gin by studying its beginnings and its pro- 

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ducers. To study it in its entirety is to study 
the spirit of God Himself, and to study 
it individually is to study the soul of man. 
History began only with the civilization of 
man and the keeping of unimpassioned record 
for no purpose of partisanship ; and not for 
praise only, but for the steady protection and 
progress of mankind. From the world around 
us, and from what has been, we find our his- 
tory to be made. 

This distinction at last, in these later years, 
having been clearly made between literature 
and history, b.ut one thing follows, and must 
follow in the course of time — that is, differ- 
ence in their teaching. Heretofore all has 
been considered literature and has been so 
taught, from myth to modern song. 

History stands now, clear and distinct, by 
itself and should be taught from the present 
back to its sources, with a contemporary sur- 
vey at every step. 

Beginning with the present state of man- 
ners and men, in whatever country or clime, 

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all available records should contribute to the 
understanding of the production of the pres- 
ent age. That, before being studied, takes 
us farther back, and so, going, we gain a phil- 
osophy and depth of knowledge otherwise 
unreached. 

For history is not the beautiful artificial 
thing that literature is — literature which is 
true or should be true to ethics only, and 
which soars with free and rainbow wing above 
the realm of fact. History marches, like the 
armies of Napoleon, in solid platoons and 
columns along the highways of fact, and falls, 
if it must fall, every man in his place, defeated 
only in the invasion of the dark, barbaric 
past. 

All history should be taught backwards, to 
give its full effect and importance. When 
the world really comprehends the vast ac- 
quisitions it has made in the last thirty years, 
it will be so done. 

That I have not done it myself, is no 
fault of mine. The teacher's desk has been 

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JUL 20 ^903 



mine for twenty years, but other and less con- 
genial tasks allotted me have left no oppor- 
tunity for a life's cherished design. 

Mary E. B. Emery. 

Lynn, Mass., U. S. A., 1903. 



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